SEC: Officials Surfing Pornography Sites During Financial Crisis

The Securities and Exchange Commission senior employees spent hours on the agency’s computers looking at sites such as naughty.com, skankwire and youporn as the financial crisis was unfolding. The investigation, which was conducted by the SEC’s internal watchdog at the request of Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, found 31 serious offenders during the past two and a half years. One senior attorney at SEC headquarters in Washington spent up to eight hours a day accessing Internet porn, according to the report, which has yet to be released. Another SEC accountant used his SEC-issued computer to upload his own sexually explicit videos onto porn websites he joined. And another SEC accountant attempted to access porn sites 16,000 times in a single month. That’s less than 1 percent of the agency’s 3,500 employees but 17 of the alleged offenders were senior SEC officers whose salaries ranged from $100,000 to $222,000 per year.

The report concluded that most of the cases began in 2008, just as the financial system began to collapse, and the problem hasn’t stopped. The most recent case cited in the report occurred four weeks ago.